There are long symphonies and long symphonies. Bruckner and Mahler place you at the epicentre of their worlds, and wherever “you’re at” at a particular time, you can always check the horizon, confirm your bearings. Not so I’m afraid with the Swiss pianist, conductor and composer Fritz Brun (1878-1959) whose overrich, hugely discursive and thematically dull Eighth Symphony (1942), one of 10, replicates the then-recent symphonic past for near on an hour without saying anything of lasting significance. Formally, this is fairly well built music – boxes are ticked, rules duly honoured – but for all its busyness it fails to inhabit the memory. I listened straight through twice without much pleasure, though the Notturno third movement features some unusual dialoguing between the violin and bass clarinet. The Variations (1944) for piano and strings are rather more attractive and very nicely played by Adrian Aeschbacher. Brahms seems to me a significant influence, and the scoring here is at least more transparent than in the Symphony.

The orchestral performances sound more than serviceable. Paul Sacher was a dab hand at tackling new scores (the Variations is one of his countless commissions) while Brun himself conducted on many occasions: he knew Busoni and Nikisch, and was a great friend of the conductor Volkmar Andreae. He retired from public duties with a performance of a complete Beethoven cycle and certainly commands a spirited performance of his Eighth Symphony, though being live there are inevitable ragged edges here and there. Guild add an extra track containing an excerpt from the shorter work’s eighth variation, “untreated” so as to show up the advantages of their generally competent mastering.

Sorry to sound so negative about this CD, which, it should be said, has a usefully modest price point in its favour. Indeed, musical traditionalists and symphonically inclined Romantic revivalists may well twiddle their thumbs less than I did.